New film chases glaciers, with time-lapse photos

LOS ANGELES Al Gore won an Oscar with a documentary that used bar graphs and pie charts to illustrate climate change and the fate of the Earth.

Six years after Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," a new film, "Chasing Ice," goes beyond the data and the diagrams to document the disappearance of the world's glaciers with time-lapse photography.

Nature photographer James Balog has been capturing the grandeur of glaciers and ice floes since 2007. He started the Extreme Ice Survey the same year, which is considered the most wide-ranging photographic study of glaciers.

What started as a video record of Balog and his team's Arctic excursions instead turned into "Chasing Ice," a chronicling of the effort to capture and consolidate time-lapse photos over months and years of vanishing polar landscapes.

The film is released in large U.S. cities on Friday with a national rollout later in November.

Balog came to the idea of illustrating the changing ice floes with time-lapse montages while shooting single images of glaciers for magazines like National Geographic.

"It was pretty evident to me that single frame could only take you a very little distance into telling the story of that ice. I started to get the idea that I would be coming back and repeating some of these camera positions in years to come," Balog told Reuters.

"And yet after I got done editing the film for the story ... I realized maybe time-lapse would be better than just revisiting these sites over and over again."

The composite images, which are made up of still photographs taken every hour or so over the course of months, show how much glaciers have shrunk. Balog and his crew were equally floored by the images they had captured.

"We were really stunned especially right in the beginning, but now, six years into this, we're still stunned when we see these pictures and see how the landscape has changed. It's bringing to life something that is otherwise invisible, otherwise really unimaginable," he said.

"Chasing Ice" won the audience award for best documentary at the 2012 SXSW festival, and the documentary cinematography award at the Sundance festival in January.

Although climate change was rarely mentioned in the recent U.S. presidential election campaign, the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy in the U.S. Northeast has placed the environment back in the headlines.

Balog and "Chasing Ice" director Jeff Orlowski both made it clear that their film was not intended as a political statement.

"That wasn't the goal. But based on the response to the film, based on how much people are resonating with it, we're really curious to see how far it can go to influence this issue," Orlowski said.

A photograph of the Solheim Glacier in Iceland taken in 2006 by photographer James Balog is pictured in this publicity photograph released to Reuters November 16, 2012. A red line indicates the size of the glacier. A comparison photo taken in 2009 shows the disappearance of...

A photograph of the Solheim Glacier in Iceland taken in 2009 by photographer James Balog is pictured in this publicity photograph released to Reuters November 16, 2012. A red line indicates the previous size of the glacier. Six years after the documentary 'An Inconvenient...

Adam LeWinter is pictured ice climbing in Survey Canyon, Greenland by photographer James Balog in this 2009 publicity photograph released to Reuters November 16, 2012. Six years after the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth,' a new film 'Chasing Ice' goes beyond the data and...

Photographer James Balog is pictured at the Columbia Glacier, Alaska, with two of his EIS time-lapse cameras used to film 'Chasing Ice' in late August 2009 in this publicity photograph released to Reuters November 16, 2012. Six years after the documentary 'An Inconvenient...